university of birmingham amidst things
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University of Birmingham
Amidst Things:Smith, Kate
DOI:10.1017/S0018246X17000516
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Citation for published version (Harvard):Smith, K 2018, 'Amidst Things: New Histories of Commodities, Capital, and Consumption', The HistoricalJournal, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X17000516
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DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X17000516
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1
AMIDST THINGS:
NEW HISTORIES OF COMMODITIES, CAPITAL AND CONSUMPTION
KATE SMITH
University of Birmingham
Abstract: The article engages with three recently published works, which represent a
cross-section of different approaches to studying processes related to the material
world. The works consider the emergence of global systems of cotton manufacturing
and its relationship to capitalism, the growth of tea consumption in Britain and its
social, cultural and economic impacts, and histories of consumption over a broad
chronological and geographical span, repspectively. Together they demonstrate that
histories of production, trade, consumption, and use, are being rethought in light of
the new approaches and questions prompted by global history and new histories of
capitalism. At the same time, the article argues, the publication of these works
suggests that fundamental assumptions about the material world are changing. Under
the influence of new materialism, historians are increasingly being driven to tackle
questions of agency, materiality and thingness. As a result, rather than studying what
objects mean, historians are increasingly asking what things do. The article argues for
the need to ensure that such approaches continue to interact with cultural and social
concerns in order to form analyses that fully grapple with the complexity of the
material world, as it existed in the past.
2
The material world is all around us. We sit amidst and with it, depending on it in ever-
increasing ways. Historians in a range of sub-fields are using the material world as a
lens through which to explore varied historic phenomena. They are asking not only
how the material world came to be produced, exchanged, and acquired, but also what
role it played in shaping everything from identities to conflicts, governmentality to
knowledge construction and transfer, as well as the practices of everyday life. Sven
Beckert’s Empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism (2014); Markman
Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger’s Empire of tea: the leaf that conquered
the world (2015), and Frank Trentmann’s Empire of things: how we became a world
of consumers from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first (2016) all analyse key
processes connected to the material world.1 These publications ask very different
historical questions and utilize distinct approaches to explore capitalism, production,
trade, and consumption. Sven Beckert’s Empire of cotton takes a global perspective to
examine the changing geographies and power structures of cotton cultivation and
textile production as they switched between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger’s work explores a different commodity - tea. Empire of
tea examines how Chinese and then Indian tea became essential to British culture
from the seventeenth century to the present. Finally, Trentmann’s Empire of things
examines how, between the fifteenth century and the present day, consumption ‘has
become a defining feature of our lives’. It explores not only consumption’s changing
history and geographies over time, but also contemporary issues, such as credit, debt,
and waste, to understand the longer histories of our present relationship to the
material world and its rapid consumption. In many ways then, these books, with their
different approaches and questions, do not belong together. They sit more easily
within their own sub-fields of cultural and economic history, or within particular
3
approaches: be they global history, new histories of capitalism, or consumption
studies. Yet, despite such differences, these works are connected by their focus on
processes critical to the material world, such as cultivation, production, trade, and
consumption, and the impacts of such processes in the past. Examining these distinct
works together, and exploring their underlying assumptions about things,
demonstrates that a shift is taking place within historical scholarship concerned with
the material world.
Rather than a ‘world’ of goods, recent work by Beckert, Ellis, Coulton,
Mauger, and Trentmann identifies ‘empires’ of goods, a mark of how analyses of the
material world are increasingly invested in exploring power.2 The term denotes an
earlier tradition of consumption history, which explored the power that objects held
over consumers. It also references more recent insights in political economy that
stress the power and violence that existed (and exist) within the systems of
governance, production, trade, and consumption that produce and mobilise goods.3
Finally, ‘empire’ also gestures towards a theoretical shift. It suggests that goods, be
they cotton or tea, can be simultaneously understood as ‘things’. It references the
latest ‘material turn’, which sees ‘things’ not as inert and passive, but rather as
animated, animating, and effective. In this new understanding, ‘things’ are understood
as having an existence outside of object/subject relations, as entities that can effect
change and thus have power.
Historical scholarship is constantly turning. Yet scholars often only recognize
‘turns’ in hindsight, as a means of making sense of the field.4 The 1980s are often
identified as an important moment, in which history turned towards forms of cultural
theory, which built on and utilized the insights of the ‘linguistic turn’.5 Alongside
deconstructing texts to analyse language and meaning, the cultural turn also sought to
4
unpick the means by which knowledge was constructed and power embedded. The
turn to the cultural has also been understood as a moment in which history, amongst
other disciplines, turned away from the materialist tradition. Yet, here the language of
turns appears divisive. Rather than turning away, some scholars continued to examine
the material conditions of life, and came to the material world with new and important
questions shaped by cultural history.6 Instead of a material turn, therefore, it is more
productive to examine how our understanding of the material world has broadened
and changed over the last thirty years. It is significant that the recent growing interest
in the material world has coincided with the development of theoretical interventions
by philosophers, political scientists, literary scholars, and anthropologists, which
through stressing the animated and effective nature of materiality are challenging
underlying assumptions and prompting new questions.7 Within the current resurgence,
historians (particularly political and economic historians) are asking, not just how
people utilised the material world, but also, how was the material world built and
what did it do? Recognizing a broadening, rather than a turn, allows for continued
interactions between what might be perceived as distinct and different areas of study.
Such interactions are important in cultivating critical material histories that grapple
with the social, cultural, political, and economic work that constructs and confronts
the material world.
I.
Writing histories with a worldwide scope has a long tradition, yet in the last thirty
years ‘global history’ has emerged as a particular approach.8 Global history is
connected to but distinct from world history, which might be understood as ‘serious
5
attempts to treat historical phenomena that arise on a world scale’.9 In contrast, global
history has emerged at once as a mode of analysis that attempts to consider the
development of globalization and the increasingly interconnected nature of the planet,
and at another, as a form of historical research that attempts to tell ‘a story without a
center’.10 Economic historians have been at the forefront of global history, using it as
a means to track and highlight connections between economic systems and processes
in the early modern and modern period. In the 1990s, members of the ‘California
School’ such as R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz used global approaches to
analyze larger integrated economic systems and pointedly resisted locating Europe at
their centre.11 Such histories deeply impacted on historical understandings of
European economic growth and during the early 2000s, global approaches were
crucial in constructing new historical narratives, which explored how connectivity
shaped Europe’s rapid economic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.12
Examining connections and encounters prompted new questions about the movement
of people, things, knowledge, and practices between countries and continents. As such
historians of migration, science and technology, and material culture have
incorporated global approaches within their analysis to better understand systems, but
also people, knowledge, and things in the past. 13 Such impacts have been felt not only
in early modern and modern European historiography but also elsewhere. Historians
of earlier periods have begun to explore the significance of global approaches.
Medieval scholars have underlined the importance of studying ‘the global’ in its own
terms within the Middle Ages to drive new research areas.14
Within global history, commodities have emerged as an important subject of
analysis. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai defined commodities as ‘objects of
economic value’ where value is not inherent, but rather ‘is a judgment made about
6
them by subjects’.15 Exchange is the source of valuation, creating the specific cultural
and historical contexts in which values are assigned. Commodification is not
permanent: it is a transitional process.16 In global history, commodities have been
assigned important roles as ‘context spinners’.17 Writing histories of connections
across time and space through the frame of a single commodity has given focus to
ambitious and complex histories. Global historians have revealed the different
geographies through which commodities moved and the diverse economic, political,
and cultural systems in which they became embedded.18 As such, global history has
tended to establish new geographies, although these are often no less ‘centred’.19 At
the same time, following a commodity through diverse connections and processes has
highlighted the importance of commodities, leading to better understandings of the
process of commodification and how economic, political, social, and cultural values
have been assigned and negotiated across space and time.20
Empire of tea considers the long processes by which a particular commodity
came to be universally embraced. Globally-inflected in approach, Ellis, Coulton, and
Mauger explore trade and connections to examine how tea became influential in
Britain, inserting ‘itself within Britain’s social and economic life’ over the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.21 Empire of tea explicitly
understands tea as active and animate, as more than ‘an inert material commodity in
these processes, for it actively transforms those subjected to its influence’.22
Strikingly the book is written by literary scholars and is the most interdisciplinary of
those under discussion. It moves between economic, scientific, cultural, political,
social, and literary processes to uncover the multiple ways in which tea became a
quintessentially British foodstuff. It was in the eighteenth century that the cultural,
social, and economic work of embedding tea happened in earnest. Increasingly
7
regular trade between Britain and China and the joining of the New and Old East
India Companies in England in 1702, meant that Britain relied less on Dutch imports
and saw its own supply of tea grow. As it grew, the East India Company (EIC)
developed greater infrastructure within London for landing, storing, inspecting,
selling, and distributing tea.23 At the same time, with the development of customs
charges and excise duties on tea, smuggling expanded supplies. Utilizing ports and
coastlines around the country, smuggling opened up tea consumption nationwide, and
price reduction broadened its consumption among different social groups.24 By the
Commutation Act of 1784, the link between tea and metropolitan tastes had been
broken and tea had become ordinary outside the capital. Yet other processes were also
important in encouraging the growth in tea consumption and the naturalization of tea.
Natural philosophers’, physicians’, and horticulturalists’ interest in tea plants and
cultivation was important, as was the negotiation and scripting of British
understandings of tea by essayists, poets, and satirists.25 Through such works and
tea’s prior links to the women of court, tea came to be associated with politeness,
women, and conversation. Alongside these positive endorsements, tea was also
perceived as troublesome: a substance that encouraged gossip and dependence.26
Whether positive or negative, such discussions provided the cultural work that
allowed tea to be understood, accepted, and desired, as its supply increased. Hence,
‘By the late eighteenth century almost everyone in England (and much of the
population in other parts of Great Britain and Ireland) drank tea of one kind or
another.’27 Moreover, in the Victorian period, ‘tea did not merely remain everybody’s
drink: it became everybody’s drink, all of the time’.28 Tea became a marker of
national character, a status further consolidated by it being increasingly sourced from
plantations in the colonial subcontinent, rather than China.29 Empire of tea shows the
8
long and difficult process of naturalization by examining a range of activities from
literary discussions to economic legislation, marketing infrastructure, and scientific
knowledge.
While such cross-disciplinary work is rich, it also underlines the difficulties in
writing histories of a single commodity. Single commodity histories are problematic
in asking particular goods to appear unique rather than as part of a range of goods that
worked together to deliver particular social practices and meet desires. Ellis, Coulton,
and Markman note how ‘Tea from China, coffee from Arabia and chocolate from
Mexico came into public notice in Britain virtually simultaneously in the 1650s.’30 In
its earliest iteration tea entered the market alongside other hot, stimulating beverages
obtained from outside Europe. Yet the importance of such confluence is left
unexplored. Other commodities could have been included in the analysis to consider
how their related introduction (from different geographies and by diverse routes)
within particular sites informed one another, allowing the market for hot beverages to
grow and prosper in specific ways. As Empire of tea briefly notes, the means by
which tea became naturalized within Britain interacted with those that embedded
porcelain.31 In contrast to single commodity studies, other historians have begun to
consider goods together more fully, such as Marcy Norton’s work on tobacco and
chocolate in the Atlantic World or Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch’s work on
the integration of hot drinks into urban cultures in the eighteenth-century Southern
Low Countries.32 Similarly, research on ceramics has explored the ways in which the
success of Chinese porcelains traded through Eurasian networks was shaped by the
simultaneous popularity of other commodities.33 Further work, which seeks to
examine assemblages of commodities and their appropriation, is needed to reveal the
often inter-dependent nature of their popularity. It may also prove significant in
9
explaining failure: why did certain commodities and practices, such as chewing betel
quid, not develop in particular regions?34
Alongside the difficulties of writing single commodity histories, recent
attempts to broaden the object biographies approach suggests further questions.35 Igor
Kopytoff’s early work on object biographies has proved influential, with commodity
histories tending to conceive of commodities in terms of the means by which they are
produced, traded, and exchanged and then consumed and used, and how during these
stages they simultaneously under go processes of cultural construction which render
and re-render them as commodities.36 Object biographies follow commodities from
their ‘birth’ (cultivation or production) to their ‘death’ (consumption, use, disuse).
However, new materialism (which will be discussed in more detail later) is prompting
scholars to reconsider this approach, particularly in terms of how object ‘lives’ align
to human ‘lives’ and thus fails to ‘realize the full potential to trace the conjunction of
things over time and space’.37 Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie argue for
the importance of ‘itineraries’, which trace ‘the strings of places where objects come
to rest or are active, the routes through which things circulate, and the means by
which they are moved’.38 Such an approach takes into account the excessiveness of
things, in that they have modes of being that humans are unable to observe but that
can ultimately impact humans.39 Understanding commodities simultaneously as
things, prompts scholars to be mindful of such excessiveness and the ways in which it
shaped what commodities were and did for humans. Jennifer Anderson’s Mahogany,
analyses the itinerary of mahogany as a living thing, material, commodity, and good.
It explores mahogany as an entity ‘prior’ to the commodification process, but also
reveals the ongoing dialogue between raw materials and commodities. Anderson
notes that ‘Over time, mahogany depletion and the ensuing search to find new sources
10
fundamentally reshaped how it was valued, used, and perceived.’40 Such an approach
follows both ‘materials’, as well as the consumed object. Similarly, fully
understanding tea as an animate thing that ‘actively transforms those subjected to its
influence’ requires greater attention to its cultivation as well as its ongoing material
properties in order to recognize a broader range of physical and material impacts.41
Single commodity histories continue to provide an important strand of global
history, illuminating connections across time and space. Nevertheless, commodities
are rarely ‘single’ but rather consistently interconnect with other goods. At the same
time, commodification is never complete: it is a constant and ongoing process that
shapes material histories. Engaging with the excessiveness of things is important in
writing histories that capture the complexity of the material world and the (often
fleeting) particularity of human roles within it. Such questions are distinct from those
embarked on by earlier global historians. Nevertheless, global approaches will be
crucial to exploring the excessiveness of commodities and things as they existed and
travelled across boundaries and borders, forming new geographies.
II.
In Empire of cotton, Sven Beckert asserts that ‘only a global viewpoint allows us to
understand the great realignment that each of these local stories was part of’.42 A
global approach not only connects local instances of commodity cultivation and
manufacture, it also provides the broad lens needed for comprehending and
explaining economic systems. Utilizing this approach, Beckert identifies seven
broadly chronological stages of development within the global cotton industry of the
early modern and modern period. First, India’s domination over cotton production
11
from around the tenth to the early nineteenth century; second, Europe’s incursions in
the sub-continent, often by force, between 1600 and 1800; third, Europe’s attempts to
manufacture cotton yarn and cloth itself from the eighteenth century onwards and its
use of protectionist policies to cultivate its burgeoning industry; fourth, Europe, and
more particularly England’s, project of establishing steady supplies of raw cotton
from the Caribbean Islands and Brazil and then the southern states of America, which
led to England’s emergence as the dominant force in the cotton yarn and cloth
industry by 1815; fifth, the continued growth of European cotton manufacturing in the
nineteenth century leading to further searches for raw cotton supplies, particularly in
India, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, and China; sixth, the increasing abstraction of the
market for cotton through trading and eventually, through speculation and finally in
the twentieth century, as India rose again as a major producer of raw cotton, cotton
production began to turn to the global south and the global countryside.
Understanding the realignments of capital and power that took place makes local
circumstances and experiences more meaningful. It provides crucial insights
(explored below) and is made possible by research across an astonishing range of
archival sources and geographies. Yet seeking to provide the broader frame within
which ‘local stories’ can be connected and understood is problematic: it assumes a
parity of knowledge about different ‘locals’ even though many local stories have yet
to be explored fully or researched at all. As Robert DuPlessis’s recent The material
atlantic ably demonstrates, people living in different ‘local’ sites around the Atlantic
Basin responded in remarkably divergent ways to the global trade in textiles and the
importation of cotton.43 DuPlessis’s findings underline the need to fully engage with
heterogeneity supplied by the ‘local’, when engaging with broader geographies and
connections. Forming broad frameworks, before research examining a more diverse
12
range of geographies and local contexts have been developed, risks a continued
distortion of explanatory frameworks and perpetuating historical understandings of
global capitalism (and its impacts) that continue to place Europe and the North
America at their centre.
The new history of capitalism is a growing field within American institutions,
and is producing innovative and enriching histories.44 Rather than completely ‘new’,
this area of research seeks to distinguish itself from older histories of capitalism
through asking different questions. As Seth Rockman asserts, ‘the field’s intervention
is to de-naturalize capitalism, to provide the history of a system that the dominant
culture depicts as timeless and irresistible, even in the midst of crisis’.45 New histories
of capitalism, like Beckert’s, resist understanding ‘markets’ as natural and instead
look to the various processes and systems that produced and reproduced them.
Scholars have been drawn to infrastructure and are examining ‘the submerged
architecture – material, legal, and ideological – that makes a highway system or
telecommunication network plausible in the first place’. They are more likely to ask
‘“How does it work?” than “What does it mean?”’ 46 Yet, new histories of capitalism
also seek to offer critical histories that embrace, rather than resist, the insights of
cultural and social history. The most important intervention of new histories of
capitalism, however, has been to recognize slavery as crucial to capitalism. As such,
new histories of capitalism can be linked to research, which has sought to underline
the important role of slavery, and the wealth created through the slave trade, in
funding industry and finance in Britain.47
Shaped by and significantly shaping the new histories of capitalism
scholarship, Beckert’s analysis of the global cotton industry shows the significance of
land, labour, violence, capital, intermediaries, and the state.48 In the cotton industry
13
land was crucial to the cultivation of raw cotton for manufacture. Expropriating new
areas of land for cultivation allowed the cotton manufacturing industry to grow
quickly during the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century
the southern states of America provided an increasingly elastic supply of cotton, as
extra lands to the west were expropriated for cultivation, often by forcibly removing
or expelling native inhabitants.49 Highly labour-intensive to produce both as a raw
material and as finished cloth, cotton also required much labour. Achieving the levels
of labour necessary to grow cotton relied on violence. The systematic exploitation of
enslaved people kept cotton growing in ever-increasing quantities and added to
European manufacturers’ prosperity.50 At the same time, the effort required to
process cotton yarn and cloth often brought women and children into the labour force.
Alongside land and labour, the cotton industry relied on the movement of capital.
Ready funds were needed to purchase everything from seeds to transportation and
machinery. The supply and movement of capital (as well as materials and labour)
required intermediaries, such as merchants and banias, to ensure that supply chains
kept moving over greater distances. The tentative nature of such movements, and the
importance of intermediaries, is made clearest by the moments in which capital failed
to move, such as in the Indian countryside in the nineteenth century.51
Beckert also explores the state and underlines its significance in providing
protectionism, raising revenues, policing borders, establishing property rights and
using its military might, but also in mobilizing wage workers, for example through the
establishment of contracts and in putting down resistance.52 As with other new
histories of capitalism, political economy is central to the story of the cotton
industry.53 The state was fundamental to the development of cotton and often explains
why some areas developed a cotton industry and others did not, as in Egypt’s inability
14
to create a sustainable cotton textile industry in the early nineteenth century.54 Beckert
argues that, ‘for most of capitalism’s history the process of globalization and the
needs of nation-states were not conflicting, as is often believed, but instead mutually
reinforced one another’.55 The state was important not only within nations but across
borders, when empire encouraged ‘the ability and willingness to project capital and
power across vast oceans’.56
Together these different threads – land, labour, violence, capital,
intermediaries, and the state – construct a history that undermines ideas of European
exceptionalism. Beckert seeks to explode arguments that Europe’s economic growth
in the nineteenth century ‘can be explained by Europeans’ more rational religious
beliefs, their Enlightenment traditions, the climate in which they live, the continent’s
geography, or benign institutions such as the Bank of England or rule of law’.57
Instead ‘Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge,
often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills,
networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and
wealth that defines the modern world’.58 Beckert’s Empire of cotton is deeply
important in writing violence back into histories of capitalism. Looking to the links
between different economic systems and the changing nature of such interconnections
is crucial to revealing the systematic nature of violent incursions within trade. As Lisa
Lowe has recently argued, violent histories are forgotten when the ‘imperatives of the
state subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress’. 59
Empire of cotton re-inscribes the changing nature of violence and power within
histories of capitalism, a crucial element that has been absent from earlier histories of
global material culture and commodities.
15
While Empire of cotton provides a broader explanatory picture that underlines
the violent creation of ‘a global production complex’, the roles people played in its
creation and its specific impacts upon people’s lives are often lost. Beckert is writing
an economic rather than a social history, but given the importance of social
relationships (and the asymmetrical power often at work in such relationships) upon
the creation of wealth and capital, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, the need to fully ‘people’ histories of global capitalism is pressing.60 Social
relationships remain frustratingly absent from global histories of capitalism, as do the
standards of living people experienced and the inequalities they endured.61 While
people are not entirely absent from Beckert’s analysis they tend to feature as
introductory motifs rather than as central elements within his analysis.62 As Natalie
Zemon Davis has argued, global history raises questions ‘about whether the sharp
edges of social history and gender history are being ignored in the descriptions of
large-scale interactions among civilizations, trading empires, and species’.63 While
social relationships and entanglements tend to be missing from global histories of
capitalism, such absences, and the silence they produce, only underline the
importance of highlighting the local when attempting to explain it.
III.
T. H. Breen’s The marketplace of revolution argued that colonists’ experience as
consumers was crucial to American history in both economic and political terms.
Engaging with the marketplace provided colonists with ‘the cultural resources needed
to develop a bold new form of political protest’. 64 In contrast, Empire of cotton
underscores production and more particularly slavery as central to American history,
16
and American capitalism. As such Empire of cotton mirrors broader changes in
economic and social history across the US and Europe, that emphasize renewed
interest in production and producers. Energy, materials, capital, and labour are
growing again as key areas of investigation, as are the processes and practices that
shaped and produced them. In British history, the resurgent interest in production has
perhaps most clearly emerged in new debates on the importance of energy in
sustaining economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.65 While it might
appear that histories of production and trade are holding all before them again, the
publication of Frank Trentmann’s ambitious and important volume Empire of things:
how we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first
demonstrates that histories of consumption continue to thrive. 66 The erudition and
complexity of Empire of things shows that the historiography of consumption is now
a well-developed area of research.67 Drawing together so many different strands of
research will prove invaluable in making sense of the field and introducing its
complexity to students. At the same time, the volume also points to the ways in which
research in consumption studies is changing.
The history of consumption emerged as a key sub-field in the 1980s,
particularly among historians of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. The
birth of consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England, led
to a hunt for the origins of consumer society with scholars exploring ever earlier
periods and different geographies from Renaissance Italy to the seventeenth-century
Netherlands.68 More recently, Martha Howell’s intervention in such debates has
highlighted the importance of the changes in commerce between 1300 and 1600.
However, Howell stresses that while such changes may have ‘set the terms for future
socio-economic developments, they were not themselves embryonic forms of what we
17
call capitalism’.69 Instead the economic culture of the medieval period must be
approached ‘on its own terms’.70 While the hunt for origins may have lost its
exuberance, over the last thirty-five years early modern and modern scholars have
actively interrogated questions of who engaged with consumption practices, how and
why.71 Scholars have been keen to investigate the groups who were involved in
broadening the consumer base, looking to question prices, wages, and living
standards.72 They have also examined changes in the places and processes by which
consumption took place, exploring how emergent retail spaces and second-hand
markets changed the nature of consumption.73 Historians have looked to issues of
social emulation and identity formation to ask why individuals were motivated to
consume more.74 More recently, they have asked where these new, exciting goods
came from, underlining the importance of global trade and a variety of connections,
and where they went when no longer in use, shaping practices of waste and reuse.75
Many of these debates and more are outlined in Empire of things, which begins by
exploring how people became consumers from the fifteenth century to present, before
examining contemporary preoccupations with consumption and their historic context,
including credit and saving, speed and quality of life and leisure, impact on
generations, consuming outside the marketplace, movement of goods and people,
impact on religious life, and waste and disposing of goods.
Empire of things gives a strong sense of the established scholarship, but also
highlights more recent debates and issues concerned with consumption, including a
growing interest in what things do rather than what they mean, an interest also
apparent, as we have seen, in new histories of capitalism and global history. The
growing group of scholars asking ‘what do things do?’, suggests that the theoretical
insights about objects, things and materiality, emerging more coherently in the
18
humanities as ‘new materialism’ are beginning to significantly impact the questions
we ask about, and how we interpret, human relationships to and interactions with the
material world. The name Empire of things, in itself suggests the importance of
tackling the ‘doings’ of the material world.76 ‘Objects’ (in contrast to ‘things’) are
primarily important in their relationship to a subject. As W. J. T. Mitchell asserts
‘Objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is, with a name, an identity, a
gestalt or stereotypical template, a description, a use of function, a history, a
science’.77 In contrast, the term ‘thing’ attempts to understand non-human entities in
their broader being, seeking out evidence of their existence beyond their relationship
to humans. In including ‘things’ in his title, therefore, Trentmann gestures towards an
important analytical shift that sees things not only in relation to humans, but also as
broader entities that can effect change in order to fully understand the different
aspects of what they ‘do’ and how and why they do it.78
Getting beyond an examination of a particular subject-object relationship to
the thing has proved difficult and has drawn the attention of philosophers, literature
scholars, environmental humanities scholars, political scientists, and historians.79
Discussions have emerged as to the extent to which such entities can, have the
intention to, and do, affect processes. In Reassembling the social: an introduction to
actor-network-theory (2005), Bruno Latour argued that ‘any thing that does modify a
state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an
actant’.80 Things may not act with intention but they do effect. 81 The human and
material are not separate but porous, continually informing and shaping each other.82
Such insights have been broadened and enriched by the theoretical models of object-
oriented ontologists, who suggest the need for analytical lenses which interrogate
different things simultaneously.83 As we see in Trentmann’s Empire of things, these
19
new forms of social analysis have become important in historical understanding,
leading to the emergence of ‘new materialism’ as a particular (but still often partially
used) approach.84 ‘New materialism’ asserts the need to analyse the material world
beyond a human-centric standpoint.85 The binaries of nature/culture, life/matter are
perceived as artificial and unproductive. The divisions that have emerged between the
two have been asserted by humans and exist as markers of the continued human-
centric project. Moving away from human-centric analyses and taking account of
other actors from albatrosses to grass and from slime to iron ore is important if we are
to fully understand the complexity of the world and its interconnected nature. 86
Moreover, being more aware of the earth and the diversity of matter living within its
eco-systems, might enable us to acknowledge the deeply problematic nature of the
materially-intensive lifestyles enjoyed by certain sections of the human species.87
Changing historical analysis in ways that allows for greater ecological complexity is
an important task that may well prove to be all encompassing in the decades to come.
While histories of consumption have long been shaped by economics,
anthropology, and material culture studies, the impact of environmental, urban, and
political history is now being felt, as consumption (particularly nineteenth- and
twentieth-century consumption) comes to be increasingly understood in terms of
material flows and systems. William Cronon’s Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the
Great West (1991), has proved important. It explored how the growth of Chicago
during the nineteenth century was intimately related to the changes taking place in the
Great West. By seeing city and country as bound together Cronon broke down the
nature/culture divide and opened the way for work that seeks to challenge such
binaries and instead look to flows and systems.88 More recently, Timothy Mitchell’s
Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (2002) has shown how scholars
20
examining techno-political systems can draw on the material world (such as the
Aswan dam) and non-human actors (such as mosquitos) to explain processes of
change and the development of political situations, an approach mirrored more
recently in the work of Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett.89 Similarly, Trentmann’s
Empire of things might be understood as influenced by this broader shift. Trentmann
considers flows and systems at various points within Empire of things, but particularly
when considering cities, homes and waste.90 For example, in chapter four, Trentmann
discusses how the consumption of gas and water in nineteenth-century cities was
often unequal, even within small geographical areas.91 Consumption levels were
culturally contingent and significantly dependent on private provision, infrastructure,
and governance.92 Moreover, in his final chapter, when grappling with waste and the
difficulties of examining the extent to which contemporary citizens dispose of
materials, Trentmann discusses the importance of considering ‘material-flow analysis’
and how it asks us to consider all the materials that go into making any one item,
‘from the petrol used to ship it to the resources needed to get rid of it’.93 It is
important not only to consider objects from their moment of making to that of
discarding, but rather to also consider how whether ‘recycled, buried or burnt,
material particles flow back into eco-systems, be it as sludge or CO2 emissions’.94
Here Trentmann works to explore much longer itineraries of goods and thus the
excessiveness of things. In light of these approaches and his earlier work, Trentmann
might be understood as distinctly shaped by and shaping the ‘new materialism’
paradigm. Trentmann explicitly discusses his need to look at things not just as
communicators of meaning but also as entities with material properties that have
impacts even after their ‘social life’ as an object might have ended.95 He asserts that
‘things are not only bearers of meanings or symbols in a universe of communication.
21
They also have material forms and functions. They can be hard or soft, flexible or
stubborn, loud or quiet, manual or fully automatic, and much else.’96
Nevertheless as historians continue to look to what things do, it is important
that the cultural and social modes of analysis are not obscured. One of the major
issues of ‘de-centring’ the human within historical analysis is that many humans have
yet to be ‘centred’. Such problems are particularly pertinent to cultural and social
historians (such as those interested in material culture) who have long been engaged
in analyzing forms of material expression to uncover voices and give agency to those
who are or have been marginalized.97 Political theorist Jane Bennett has considered
the politics of the object-oriented-ontology and new materialist project. As she notes,
critics of these projects state that ‘the ontological divide between persons and things
must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for
condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentaliztion (as when
powerful humans exploit illegal, poor, young, or otherwise weaker humans)’.98
Bennett argues, however, that one way of understanding the analytical and social
benefits of flatter ontologies is that elevating ‘the status of the materiality of which we
are composed’ would ‘distribute value more generously’ as a whole.99 In fact, ‘Vital
materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a
world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they
do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other)
model of personhood.’100 While the elevation of all material might allow a broader
range of humans to be understood and valued more fully, the politics and hierarchies
of such studies continues to need addressing. As Mel Y. Chen has asserted, examining
the ‘animacy’ of things has its own politics, which distinctly privileges and values
particular forms of animacy.101 Thus those tools that have long been used by social
22
and cultural historians, among others, to focus on historical actors who have been
marginalized and reveal the systems and structures that have created and maintained
such distance from the centres of power, remain important. At the same time, critical
engagement with the ways in which race, class, sexuality and gender shape the
theorization of things are critical in creating a fuller understanding of the material
world and our ability to ever ‘glimpse’ at things.102
Historians need to be careful that any impending shift to systems and flows
does not obscure or detract from other forms of material history. Material culture
concerns with why and how humans historically have used the material world to
express meaning, as well as to perform particular actions and practices, continue to be
important and contribute to our understanding of how things have resisted and shaped
such projects. Trentmann argues that historians must consider ‘connecting “hard” (but
fragile) things and networks to the “soft” world of possessions and the domestic
interior’ to create ‘a space for material politics, reconnecting private and public and
providing a bridge between histories of politics and material culture’.103 Finding such
bridges and interconnections is crucial, but historians also need to resist perpetuating
binaries that divide the material world into ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ and the gendered
connotations such terms can denote. How an account book or irrigation system
accrues meaning, is as important and analytically rich as how it works and what it
does. Similarly the uses and meanings of teacups are intimately tied to the uses and
meanings of sewer systems. While these questions might seem to represent distinct
epistemological goals, we must question why they have become so distinct and
require bridging at all. Rather than finding bridges between different areas of analysis,
assemblages of objects, things, humans and nonhumans need to be understood
together in different ways to enrich analyses.
23
IV.
Our underlying assumptions about the things that make up the material world are
shifting. Rather than inert and passive forms beholden to human subjects, the material
world is being re-analysed as active, animated, and animating. Historians are asking
what things do, rather than what they mean. In doing so they recognize that things not
only exist in relation to humans, but also have their own existence, beyond human
recognition and that that can impact on historical processes. There is an excessiveness
of things, which must be confronted in historical analyses of the material world. In
considering processes of commodification, understanding such excessiveness is
important and prompts a reiteration of the insight that commodification is always a
process of transition, continually coming into being. The excessiveness of things
effects the creation of ‘commodities’ before and during production and even long
after the point of exchange. Grappling with such excessiveness and the ways in which
things constantly interact with other things underscores the need to understand the
interactions between different things, seeing commodities as assemblages that are
simultaneously distinguished by humans through particular processes and constantly
indistinguishable from other things. The local thus remains important as a site in
which to investigate such interactions and their effects on the global. Similarly, more
inclusive forms of analysis are required to fully understand consumption: the broad
range of material flows that constituted any single good need to be confronted.
While grappling with things and their excessiveness is important, it is also
necessary to be attentive to the politics of when and where we acknowledge the
animacy of things. Historians need to unpick when and how we ‘see’ animacy in the
24
past and what such recognition might mean. We also need to reflect on our failures in
recognizing the existence of things and must be alert to just how silent and inanimate
things might appear to us and to the historical actors we study. Historians need to
collaborate in order to understand such silence and remain materially engaged
themselves. While it is increasingly necessary and important to include things in our
analysis and understand them in relation to other things, not just humans, human
engagements cannot be entirely removed but rather need to be significantly factored
in. In the first instance this is because they often played important roles within such
assemblages, but also because humans used such things to express meaning often
significantly shaping what things would go on to do and be. While Empire of cotton,
Empire of tea and Empire of things demonstrate the liveliness and richness of current
historical scholarship grappling with objects and commodities to understand historical
processes, they also underline the continued importance of interactions between
political, economic, social, and cultural approaches, in order that the material world
might be fully understood.
Department of History, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
1 Sven Beckert, Empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism (London, 2014); Markman Ellis,
Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of tea: the Asian leaf that conquered the world
(London, 2015); Frank Trentmann, Empire of things: how we became a world of consumers, from the
fifteenth century to the twenty-first (London, 2016).
25
2 ‘World of goods’ is a reference to anthropological research, which had a major impact on histories of
consumption in the late 1980s and 1990s, see Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The world of
goods: towards an anthropology of consumption (London, 1979). 3 The shift to stressing the violence and power relations of global trade is perhaps as a result of shifts in
histories of slavery and empire, which have seen a new emphasis on intimate relations and embodied
experiences. See Anne McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial context
(New York, NY and London, 1995); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of empire:
colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Walter Johnson, Soul by soul: life inside
the antebellum slave market (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal knowledge and
imperial power, race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Walter Johnson, River of
dark dreams: slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Edward E. Baptist,
The half has never been told (New York, NY, 2014).
4 James W. Cook, ‘The kids are all right: on the “turning” of cultural history’, American Historical
Review, 117 (2012), pp. 746-771, at p. 747.
5 Lynn Hunt (ed), The new cultural history (Berkeley, CA, 1989); David Chaney, The cultural turn:
scene-setting essays on contemporary cultural history (London, 1994); Lynn Hunt and Victoria
Bonnell, Beyond the cultural turn: new directions in the study of society and culture (Berkeley, CA,
1999).
6 For examples of how historians continued to explore the material conditions of life and utilized
cultural history approaches to do so, see Craig Muldrew, The economy of obligation: the culture of
credit and social relations in early modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); Margot Finn, The character
of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge, 2003). Similarly, cultural history
emerged at the same time as material culture studies, which offered a new means of considering the
importance of objects and built environments in the past through engagements with insights from
archaeology, anthropology and literary studies. See J. Richie Garrison and Ann Smart Martin,
American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, 1997).
7 Graham Harman, Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects (Chicago, 2002); Jane
Bennett, Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things (Durham, NC, and London, 2010); Levi R.
Byrant, The democracy of objects (London, 2011); Ian Bogost, Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like
26
to be a thing (Minneapolis, 2012); Timothy Morton, Realist magic: objects, ontology, causality
(London, 2013).
8 For more on longer evolution of large scale histories see Jerry H. Bentley, ‘A new forum for global
history’, Journal of World History, 1 (1990), pp. iii-v, at p. iii.
9 Bruce Mazlish, ‘Comparing global history to world history’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
28 (1998), pp. 385-395, at p. 387.
10 Pamela Crossley, What is Global History? (Cambridge, 2008), p. 4. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton, 2000), p. 6; A. G.
Hopkins, ed., Globalization in world history (London, 2002); C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern
world, 1780-1914: global connections and comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004).
11 Patrick Manning, ‘Asia and Europe in the world economy: introduction’, The American Historical
Review, 107 (2002), pp. 419-24, at p. 419-420. See R. B. Wong, China transformed: historical change
and the limits of European experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence:
China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton, NK, 2000).
12 For global approaches to rethinking European economic growth see Maxine Berg, ‘From imitation to
invention: creating commodities in eighteenth-century Britain’, The Economic History Review, 55
(2002), pp. 1-30; Maxine Berg, ‘Britain, industry and perceptions of China: Matthew Boulton, “useful
knowledge” and the Macartney embassy to China 1792-94’, Journal of Global History, 1 (2006), pp.
269-288; Maxine Berg, ‘Cargoes: the trade in luxuries from Asia to Europe’, in David Cannadine, ed.,
Empire, the sea and global history: Britain’s maritime world c.1763-c.1840 (New York, NY, and
Hampshire, 2007), pp. 60-82.
13 For global movement of things, see Bayly, The birth of the modern world; Maxine Berg, Felicia
Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the east, 1600-1800 (Basingstoke,
2015); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The global lives of things: the material culture of
connections in the early modern world (Abingdon, 2016). For global movement of people, see Natalie
Zemon Davis, Trickster travels: a sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds (New York, NY, 2006).
For global movement of knowledge and practices see Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo,
eds., The brokered world: go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA,
2009); Charles H. Parker, Global interactions in the early modern age, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2010).
27
14 Naomi Standen and Catherine Holmes, ‘Defining the global middle ages’, Medieval Worlds, 1
(2015), pp. 106-117.
15 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The
social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986), p. 3.
16 Sara Pennell, ‘Consumption and consumerism in early modern England’, The Historical Journal, 42
(1995), pp. 549-564, at p. 553.
17 As defined by Pamela Crossley ‘context spinners’ can be commodities, materials, devices,
behaviourial concepts or natural phenomena. See Crossley, What is global history?, p. 4.
18 For earlier uses of this approach see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in
modern history (New York, NY, 1986); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and chocolate, 1765-
1914 (London, 2000); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: a world history (London, 2003); Barbara Freese, Coal: a
human history (Oxford, 2003). More recently it has further come to fore, see David Hancock, Oceans
of wine: madeira and the emergence of American trade and taste (New Haven, CT, 2009); Kris E.
Lane, Color of paradise: the emerald in the age of gunpowder empires (New Haven, CT and London,
2010); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: the fabric that made the modern world (Cambridge and New York, NY,
2013); Francesca Bray, Peter A. Coclains, Edd L. Fields-Black and Dagmar Schäfer, Rice: global
networks and new histories (New York, NY, 2015). Also see Sven Beckert’s advocacy of commodity
histories: Sven Beckert, ‘Cotton and the global origins of capitalism’, Journal of World History, 28
(2017), pp. 107-20, at p. 109.
19 See for example the importance of Europe in Beckert, Empire of cotton and Riello, Cotton. 20 See Robert Finlay, The pilgrim art: cultures of porcelain in world history (Berkeley, CA and
London, 2010); Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, ‘Global China: material culture and
connections in world history’, Journal of World History, 23 (2012), pp. 3-8.
21 Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of tea, 9. Arguably interest in the importation of Asian
commodities to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth century has risen as a direct result of global
history research by Kenneth Pomeranz, Maxine Berg, Giorgio Riello and Tithanker Roy, alongside a
renewed interest in comestibles.
22 Ibid., p. 9. 23 Ibid., p. 120.
24 Ibid., p. 163 and p. 177.
28
25 Ibid., p. 73.
26 Ibid., p. 90 and pp. 187-91.
27 Ibid., p. 181.
28 Ibid., p. 221.
29 Ibid., p. 223.
30 Ibid., p. 31.
31 Ibid., pp. 151-52. See also Robert Batchelor, ‘On the movement of porcelains: rethinking the birth of
consumer society as interactions of exchange networks, 1600-1750’, in Frank Trentmann and John
Brewer, eds., Consuming cultures, global perspectives: historical trajectories, transnational exchanges
(Oxford and New York, NY, 2006), pp. 95-122; Stacey Pierson, ‘The movement of Chinese ceramics:
appropriation in global history’, Journal of World History, 23 (2012), pp. 9-39; David Porter, The
Chinese taste in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 2013).
32 Marcy Norton, Sacred gifts, profane pleasures: a history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic
world (Ithaca, NY and London, 2008); Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch, ‘Arriving to a set table:
the integration of hot drinks in the urban consumer culture of the eighteenth-century in Southern Low
Countries’, in Berg, Gottmann, Hodacs, and Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the east, pp. 309-330.
33 Maxine Berg, Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford, 2005), p. 43.
34 Trentmann, Empire of things, p. 168.
35 Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie explicitly see their intervention as complementary to Igor
Kopytoff’s early work. Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, ‘Making things out of objects that
move’, in Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, eds., Things in motion: object itineraries in
anthropological practice (Sante Fe, NM, 2015), p. 4.
36 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in Appadurai, ed.,
The social life of things, p. 68.
37 Joyce and Gillespie, ‘Making things out of objects that move’, p. 4.
38 Ibid., p. 3.
39 Ibid., p. 9.
40 Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: the costs of luxury in early America (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 6.
41 Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger, Empire of tea, p. 9.
29
42 Beckert, Empire of cotton, p. xxi.
43 Robert S. DuPlessis, The material Atlantic: clothing, commerce, and colonization in the Atlantic
world, 1650-1800 (Cambridge, 2016).
44 Scott A. Sandage, Born losers: a history of failure in America (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Stephen
Mihm, A nation of counterfeirters: capitalists, con men and the making of the United States
(Cambridge, MA, 2007); Seth Rockman, Scraping by: wage labor, slavery, and survival in early
Baltimore (Baltimore, MA, 2009); Bonnie Martin, ‘Slavery’s invisible engine: mortgaging human
property’, The Journal of Southern History, 76 (2010), pp. 817-66; Jonathan Levy, Freaks of fortune:
the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Scott Reynolds Nelson,
A nation of deadbeats: an uncommon history of America’s financial disasters (New York, NY, 2012);
Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism takes command: the social transformation of
nineteenth-century America (Chicago, IL, 2012); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s
capitalism: a new history of American economic development (Philadelphia, PA, 2016). 45 Seth Rockman, ‘What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy?’, Journal of the Early Republic,
34 (2014), pp. 439-466, at p. 447. See also Sven Beckert, Angus Burgin et al, ‘Interchange: the history
of American capitalism’, Journal of American History, 101 (2014), pp. 503-536.
46 Rockman, ‘What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy?’, p. 448.
47 Eric Williams, Capitalism & slavery (London, 1964); Joseph Inikori, Africans and the industrial
revolution in England: a study in international trade and economic development (Cambridge, 2002);
Nicholas Draper, The price of emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the
end of slavery (Cambridge, 2010); Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie
Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British slave-ownership: colonial slavery and the formation
of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2014).
48 See also Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s capitalism. 49 Beckert, Empire of cotton, p. 107.
50 Ibid., p. 93.
51 For the importance of revealing where capital cannot go as well as where it can, see Frederick
Cooper, ‘What is the concept of globalization good for? an African historian’s perspective’, African
Affairs, 100 (2001), pp. 189-213, at p. 189.
30
52 Beckert, Empire of cotton, p. 155. For earlier discussion on importance of state see Mazlish,
‘Comparing global history to world history’, p. 393.
53 Rockman, ‘What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy?’, p. 449.
54 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, p. 169. At the same time, Egypt also suffered the assaults of British
merchants.
55 Ibid., p. xxi.
56 Ibid., p. 30.
57 Ibid., p. xiv.
58 Ibid., p. xv.
59 Lisa Lowe, The intimacies of four continents (Durham, NC, and London, 2015), p. 2.
60 The lack of social analysis within new histories of capitalism, has been critiqued elsewhere, see
Rockman, ‘What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy?’, pp. 463-464. For more on the
importance of social relations in capital formation see Margot Finn, ‘Family formations: Anglo India
and the familial proto-state’, in David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds., Structures and transformations
in modern British history: essays for Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge, 2011); Catherine Hall,
‘Gendering property, racing capital’, History Workshop Journal, 78 (2014), pp. 22-38, at p. 22-3; Hall,
Draper, McClelland, Donington, and Lang, Legacies of British slave-ownership.
61 Histories of living conditions, inequalities and social relationships continue on a regional and
national level. See for example, Muldrew, The economy of obligation; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting
for oneself: worth, status and the social order in early modern England (Oxford, 2015).
62 Beckert, Empire of cotton, pp. 175-9. 63 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentring history: local stories and cultural crossings in a global world’,
History and Theory, 50 (2011), pp. 188-202, at p. 191.
64 T. H. Breen, The marketplace of revolution: how consumer politics shaped American independence
(Oxford, 2004), p. xv; Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, ‘Introduction. slavery’s capitalism’, in Beckert
and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s capitalism, p. 3. See also Carole Shammas, The preindustrial consumer
in England and America (Oxford, 1990).
65 E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English industrial revolution (Cambridge, 2010); Astrid Kander,
Paolo Malanima and Paul Warde, Power to the people: energy in Europe over the last five centuries
(Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2013);
31
66 Particularly when seen alongside Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford handbook of the history of
consumption (Oxford, 2012).
67 The well-developed nature of historical studies of consumption should come as no surprise. In the
late 1990s, Sara Pennell asserted that ‘historical studies of consumption have proliferated, seemingly
unstoppable’. Pennell. ‘Consumption and consumerism’, p. 549.
68 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The birth of consumer society: the
commercialization of eighteenth-century England (London, 1982); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer
behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London and New York, NY, 1988); John
Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993). On the hunt for origins,
see Richard A Goldthwaite, Wealth and the demand for art in Italy, 1300-1600 (Baltimore, MA, and
London, 1993); Evelyn S. Welch, Art and society in Italy 1350-1500 (Oxford, 1997); Lisa Jardine,
Worldly goods (London, 1996); Simon Schama, The embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of
Dutch culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987); Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The first
modern economy: success, failure, and perserverance of the Dutch economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge,
1997). For more on hunt for origins see Evelyn Welch, ‘Presentism and the Renaissance and early
modern historian’, Past and Present, 234 (2017), pp. 245-53.
69 Martha C. Howell, Commerce before capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 5.
70 Howell, Commerce before capitalism in Europe, p. 6.
71 An important milestone in such studies was Brewer and Porter’s 1993 volume, Consumption and the
world of goods. For a discussion of the impact of Consumption and the world of goods see Craig
Clunas, ‘Modernity global and local: consumption and the rise of the west’, The American Historical
Review, 104 (1999), pp. 1497-1511, at p. 1500.
72 Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain; Jan De Vries, The industrious
revolution: consumer behavior and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008). 73 Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s favourite: the cotton trade and the consumer in Britain, 1660-1800
(Oxford, 1991); Claire Walsh, ‘Shop design and the display of goods in eighteenth-century London’,
Journal of Design History, 8 (1995), pp. 157-176; Erica Rappaport, Shopping for pleasure: women and
the making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000); Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan,
32
eds., Spaces of consumption in the English town, c.1680-1830 (London, 2007); Ann Smart Martin,
Buying into the world of goods: early consumers in backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, MA, 2008); 74 Amanda Vickery, The gentleman’s daughter: women’s lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT
and London, 1998); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and luxury: consumer culture in
Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester and New York, NY, 1999); Berg, Luxury and pleasure; John Styles
and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, taste, and material culture in Britain and North America 1700-
1800 (London and New Haven, CT, 2006); John Styles, The dress of the people: everyday fashion in
eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT and London, 2007); Amanda Vickery, Behind closed
doors: at home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT and London, 2009).
75 Susan Strasser, Waste and want: a social history of trash (New York, NY, 1999); Ariane Fennetaux,
Amélie Junqua and Sophie Vasset, eds., The afterlife of used things: recycling in the long eighteenth
century (New York, NY, 2015).
76 The name may also reference The empire of things, a volume of essays published in 2001, which,
amongst other elements, invited a group of anthropologists to consider the how material properties are
important in making sense of objects. See Fred R. Myers, ed., The empire of things: regimes of value
and material culture (Oxford and Santa Fe, NM, 2001), p. 13.
77 W. J. T. Mitchell, What do pictures want?: the lives and loves of images (Chicago, 2005), pp. 156-7.
78 Trentmann has made the case for this analytical shift elsewhere, see Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality
in the future of history: things, practices and politics’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), p. 288.
79 See Bennett, Vibrant matter, 3. For the ways in which literary scholars have looked to these
questions see Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), pp. 1-22, at p. 4; Bill Brown,
‘The Matter of Materialism: Literary Mediations’ in Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material
powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn (London and New York, NY, 2010), p. 67. See
also Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, Subject and object in Renaissance
culture (Cambridge, 1996); Peter Schwenger, The tears of things: melancholy and physical objects
(Minneapolis, MN, 2006); Cynthia Wall, The prose of things: transformations of description in the
eighteenth century (Chicago, IL, 2006); Mark Blackwell, The secret life of things: animals, objects,
and it-narratives in eighteenth-century England (Lewisburg, PA, 2007); Diana Fuss, The sense of an
interior: four writers and the rooms that shaped them (New York, NY, 2004); Barbara Johnson,
Persons and things (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Elaine Freedgood, Ideas in things: fugitive meaning in the
33
Victorian novel (Chicago, IL, 2006); John Plotz, Portable property: Victorian culture on the move
(Princeton, NJ, 2008).
80 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (Oxford, 2005), p.
71.
81 While Latour has had a huge impact on the humanities, a theoretical debt is also owed to others. See
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (Minneapolis,
MN and London, 1987); Manuel DeLanda, A new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social
complexity (New York, NY and London, 2006). For other important work in sociology and Science and
Technology Studies see Andrew Pickering, The mangle of practice: time, agency and science
(Chicago, IL, 1995).
82 Diana Coole and Samantha Armstrong, ‘Introducing the new materialisms’, in Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost, eds., New materialisms: ontology, agency and politics (Durham, NC, 2010), p. 15.
83 Such work has been shaped by further philosophical interventions by scholars of object-oriented-
ontology (or the broader field of speculative realism). See for example Harman, Tool-Being; Graham
Harman, Guerilla metaphysics: phenomenology and the carpentry of things (Chicago, IL, 2004);
Graham Harman, Towards speculative realism: essays and lectures (Alresford, 2010); Graham
Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social (London, 2014); Graham Harman, ‘The Well-
Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism’, New Literary History, 43 (2012), pp.
183-203, at p. 187.
84 It is important to note that the material turn connected with ‘new materialism’ is sharply distinct
from material culture studies and the project that those interested in material culture are embarked on.
85 Chris Otter, ‘Locating matter: the place of materiality in urban history’ in Bennett and Joyce, eds.,
Material powers, 46.
86 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history
and us (London and New York, NY, 2016), p. 3. The importance of developing more ecologically
aware approaches to historical analysis have largely been prompted by the anthropocene. See Paul J.
Crutzen, ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, 415 (2002), pp. 23, at p. 23.
87 See Bennett, Vibrant matter, p. xi; Bonneuil and Fressoz, The shock of the anthropocene, p. 33. See
also Mark Levene, ‘Climate blues: or how awareness of the human end might re-instill ethical purpose
to the writing of history’, Environmental Humanities, 2 (2013), pp. 147-167.
34
88 William Cronon, Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, NY, 1991). For
more recent examples of works that include material systems, see Trentmann, Empire of things, pp.
174-221.
89 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2002). See
Patrick Joyce, The state of freedom: a social history of the British state since 1800 (Cambridge, 2013);
Bennett and Joyce, eds., Material powers.
90 Trentmann, Empire of things, pp. 174-221.
91 Ibid., p. 179.
92 Ibid., p. 183.
93 Ibid., p. 665.
94 Ibid., p. 664.
95 Appadurai, ed., The social life of things.
96 Trentmann, Empire of things, p. 17.
97 For example, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s sisters: a revisionist history of footbinding (Berkeley,
CA, 2005); Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (Philadelphia, PA, 2012).
98 Bennett, Vibrant matter, p. 12.
99 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
100 Ibid., p. 13.
101 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering and queer affect (Durham, NC and London,
2012), p. 5.
102 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 4.
103 Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History’, p. 286.